A Conformal Surface Wave Feed (CSWF) is believed to be unknown in the art. The closest prior art may be a low-profile waveguide (LPWG) surface-wave coupler (see FIG. 1b) that has been used to feed previous conformal Artificial Impedance Surface (AIS) antennas.
Disadvantages of this prior art are believed to be that: (1) It is not conformal. As seen in the FIG. 1b below, the LPWG protrudes from the antenna surface. (2) Its insertion loss is much higher than the presently described conformal surface wave feed. (3) It radiates power away from the surface into free space. (4) Its bandwidth is lower than the presently described conformal surface wave feed.